Wayland Enjoyed Many Successes In 2023
Wayland's 2023 was terrific with all the development milestones being met while looking ahead to 2024 more of this should reach end-users such as with the February release of Plasma 6.0. Plus the continued graphics driver improvements, XWayland enhancements, Wine 9.0, and other improved Wayland software reaching more Linux desktop users this year.
Here's a look back at the most popular Wayland stories on Phoronix from 2023:
Firefox Is Going To Try And Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default
Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!
KDE Desktop Cube Effect Returns & Plasma Wayland Per-Screen Color Management
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly recap highlighting all of the interesting accomplishments for this open-source desktop for the past week. But with not having posted last weekend, this edition highlights the many achievements made by the KDE camp over the past two weeks.
KDE Plasma 6.0 Is Enabling Wayland By Default, Initial Support For HDR-Capable Games
It's been an exciting week in the KDE space as along with releasing Plasma 6.0 Alpha, they have also committed to shipping Plasma 6.0 with the Wayland session being enabled by default.
Firefox 121 Is Looking Good For Having Wayland Enabled By Default
Firefox 121 is aiming to ship with Wayland support enabled by default rather than falling back to XWayland on modern Linux desktops. So far things are looking up for this indeed remaining the case for next month's Firefox 121 stable release.
PCSX2 Emulator Disables Wayland Support By Default
While more applications continue enabling Wayland support and getting into a shape by default, the PCSX2 open-source PlayStation 2 emulator recently moved in the opposite direction: disabling Wayland support for their distributed builds.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Dropping The X.Org Server Except For XWayland
Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland.
Wayland-Proxy Load Balancer Helping Firefox Cope With Wayland Issues
With this week's release of Firefox 121, Wayland is being used by default when encountering a native Wayland desktop. Shipping as part of Firefox 121 is wayland-proxy as a C++ module to serve as a Wayland proxy load balancer.
NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux Driver Released With Much Better Wayland Support
Earlier this month NVIDIA published the R545 Linux driver beta while today it's been promoted to the stable series with the NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux driver release.
KDE Is Down To Just One Wayland Showstopper Bug Remaining
The KDE Plasma 6.0 feature freeze is quickly approaching and the Plasma Wayland showstopper bug list is nearly cleared out for being able to endorse the Plasma Wayland session over X11.
KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future
As we roll into 2024, Wayland sadly is still proving to be a divisive topic with some frustrated with it either from past experiences or not all software yet being fully adapted to make use of Wayland directly with all available features. There's also some still hoping for an X11 renaissance that will never materialize. Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate.
Wine Wayland Driver's Vulkan Support Is Now Usable
The third and final part of the Vulkan enablement code for allowing Vulkan API graphics use within the Wine Wayland driver has been merged to Wine Git.
Xfce's Wayland Roadmap Updated
Xfce 4.18 released last December with some strides on the Wayland front for this lightweight GTK-based desktop environment, but more work remains before Xfce will be fully compatible with Wayland and its own robust compositor. The Xfce Wayland road-map was recently updated to reflect the latest work on this major undertaking.
COSMIC Desktop Rolls Out Lock/Login Screen, More Wayland Protocols
System76 engineers working on their COSMIC desktop environment for their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution continue to be quite busy working on this Rust-written desktop code.
Firefox 121 Now Available With Wayland Enabled By Default
Ahead of tomorrow's official announcement, the Mozilla Firefox 121.0 release binaries have hit the mirrors and it's keeping to the most exciting Christmas gift for Linux desktop users: Wayland support enabled by default!
Vulkan Support Begins Landing For Wine's Wayland Driver
A few days ago the Wine Wayland driver merged HiDPI support improvements and now for ending out the week is yet more work to land for Wine's Wayland driver: the first bits of Vulkan enablement.
Lab Wayland Compositor 0.7 Released - Ported To wlroots 0.17
Lab Wayland Compositor (labwc) is out with a new version ahead of Christmas for this wlroots-based window-stacking compositor that is inspired by the Openbox window manager.
MPV Player 0.35.1 Released With Wayland & PipeWire Fixes
MPV 0.35.1 is out this weekend as the latest update to this open-source media player developed as a fork originally from MPlayer/mplayer2.
Mozilla Might Finally Enable Firefox's Wayland Backend Soon
While some Linux distributions like Fedora and Arch are enabling the native Wayland back-end for Firefox by default, upstream Firefox continues to not enable this Wayland support as part of their default builds. But -- at long last -- that might finally change soon.
GTK 4.11.1 Released With Better Textures, Wayland Fractional Scaling
Following this week's Qt 6.5 LTS and Slint 1.0 Rust toolkit, debuting today is GTK 4.11.1 as the first development release of the new toolkit series in leading up to GTK 4.12.
XWayland's Rootful Mode Is Becoming More Useful
Most Linux desktop users/gamers/enthusiasts are relying on XWayland for X11 client compatibility atop Wayland compositors in the "rootless" mode. With the XWayland rootless mode, X11 applications and games can integrate nicely within a Wayland desktop environment with just the individual client window presented. However, for those interested, the XWayland "rootful" mode has become more capable this year for those wanting to render an entire X11 environment within the Wayland compositor as a window.
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